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27 Sep 2017 8:21:10am

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In what I currently take to be a happy coincidence, last Monday I bought a book which is apropos your discussion. Called Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape our Lives (by Dean Buonomano 2011, W.H. Norton & Company, New York), it noted that “no matter what we learn, it is stored as a web of associations … sculpted by a lifetime of experiences” (pp. 41 & 45), and goes on to observe that “It follows that manipulating our experiences provides a means to influences our opinions and behaviour” (p. 45). That manipulating is what advertisers and politicians do professionally, and one is particularly susceptible to that if one is unaware of the processes and methodologies involved. What he doesn't mention (at least, so far in my reading) is that this process is what largely forms our identity.

We've all seen how upset babies get. That upset really hurts them, and the identities we started to build when we were babies to avoid that pain provide a safety net. So we all start as right-wingers, unquestioningly inhaling messages from our parents, siblings and peers just as fast as we can. When we get comfortable, sometimes our identity webmaking slows and stops as being sufficient to that task. That's why Professor Marcia Langton said in her Boyer lecture that there is a natural alliance between aboriginal traditionalists and conservatives against greenies. One group of conservatives believes that everything was formed in the dreamtime and should not be changed, and the Christian conservatives assert that the world dates from 4,000BC any everything we need to know is in the Bible. Both groups fail to understand the core message of both stories. It isn't as Camille Paglia says, that if it had been up to women we'd still be living in grass huts, it's that if it were up to conservatives, be they Aboriginals or Anglos, we would not have even graduated to grass huts and if we let them have their way now the civilisation they enjoy as parasites and predators, but progressives actually built, will be destroyed.

But instead of spinning our identity webs into comfortable cocoons with “do not disturb” signs as conservatives do per se, some spin their webs into truth nets. The best design for these truth nets that mankind has come up with so far is the scientific method (the best, as sages through the ages and Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine have observed, is trans-memetic). The trouble is, as John Barrow points out in Impossibility: the Limits of Science, the more complex matters are the less reliable that becomes. Climate change is complex.

So all science is provisional, but all identities crave certainty. Conservatives can be particularly susceptible to that scientific impossibility but identity craving.

When we understand those processes and go beyond them to see what the researches of climate scientists tell us, then we can see more clearly. But those who cannot see the difference between a logical associ

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